Bitcoin's adoption continues to increase. Make no mistake about this. It is far from having "petered out": http://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-adoption-metrics/ http

Bitcoin's adoption continues to increase. Make no mistake about this. It is far from having "petered out": http://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-adoption-metrics/ http://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-adoption-metrics/ More and more people in China, Venezuela, etc, are using it to bypass currency controls. The problem was the media was hyping Bitcoin and making it sound like it would become instantaneously popular overnight. Instead, it is a process that will take some time. That is all. If, by "petered out", you were referring to the current downtrend in price, well IMHO the explanation is much simpler: Bitcoin users are just selling coins to pay their income taxes, before the IRS deadline of October 15, 2014. My reasoning is as follow: (1) a lot of Bitcoin users are American, so they fall under IRS U.S. tax laws (2) most users realized incredible gains during the 2013 tax year: Bitcoin went up 5700% from $13 to $750 between January 1 and December 31 (3) 2013 was the first year for which the IRS published official Bitcoin guidelines (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf), thereby enticing many users to pay taxes (and no, unlike what the media like to say, a lot of us are not anti-government anti-tax punks - we like to stay legal, pay taxes, and legitimize Bitcoin) (4) because a lot of Bitcoin users became "accidentally" Bitcoin-rich (with little or just a normal amount of other USD-based assets), they have no choice but to sell coins to pay taxes on their Bitcoin gains Let me tell you I experienced this first-hand: I filed for a tax extension to pay on October 15 instead of April 15. I knew my taxes would probably be around $100,000, and when my accountant was done (a few weeks ago), it was indeed about $100,000 in taxes. I had always been planning to sell coins to cover this amount, but seeing how much BTC lost value in the last weeks/months, I decided to scramble and use money from elsewhere to pay for the taxes. But I am sure that many other Bitcoin users don't have a financial cushion to be able to pay a bunch of taxes at the last minute. That's why I theorize the current downtrend is caused by people selling coins to pay for taxes. In fact, if my theory is right, there should have been a dip around the time of the first deadline for those who did not apply for an extension (and had to sell coins to pay taxes by April 15), and there WAS one exactly at this time! In fact I predicted this dip back in April: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/100577178258662783679/posts/UyfTAqPQXua https://plus.sandbox.google.com/100577178258662783679/posts/...